Cyborging the Rhetorical Tradition: Just One of Many Justifications

Most of my research and interest in the second half of this class has been dedicated to theories around and in the body, space, and the digital/technological. For my critical thinking project, I'd already begun to theorize about the body as text and text as body in digital spaces. It was no jump for me at all to begin seeing the class is a body of texts that have grown, bled, healed, changed, and experimented for these past thirteen weeks. I suggested to both Jason and Jennifer that we map these texts on the human body in order to make a connection: these texts define how, who, what, when, and where we listen, do, say things with our bodies. Not to mention, tons of things have happened to my body while reading these texts. My emotions, my body, my mind, my eyes and fingers all have a relationship with each one of these texts. I also cannot pretend that this idea of body as schema didn't stem from our recent readings of Donna Haraway's "Situated Knowledges."

I think we saw the texts taking up a very big split between the earlier part of the semester and these last few weeks. The texts seemed so disparate. Jennifer and I kept talking about how they were "tacked on" or just simply "attached" to the end of a set of texts. That's when it hit me: I offered that we were "cyborging the rhetorical tradition," and Jason and Jennifer ran with it.

Vitruvian Man
Jason came up with the idea of a cyborg'd version of the Vitruvian Man by Leonardo Divinci. We intentionally wanted to find an image where the Vitruvian Man and his background sustained some sort of texture that resembled parchment to stand in visually, along with the symbolic nature of the image itself, for what we saw as the traditional texts.

The Cyborg'd Vitruvian Man we used for our schema

We wanted the image to look older while putting a modern twist on it. This might be making a comment about how we saw rhetorical studies and theory--that it is, despite its continual practice, an antiquated practice and kind of thought. This, however, was not the intent. We simply wanted to portray the message that we saw the course as altering a traditional set of texts and bringing them into the future. We thought the body would work well because we saw the texts as "connected [yet] fractured," operating intimately in order to create a larger being. We saw the body as a tool, as a metaphor for the course.

The Original Vitruvian Man

Jason, Jennifer, and I wanted to make sure that our audience new that we didn't see the rhetorical tradition as a singular unit, but more so composed of multiple rhetorical traditions. This is why we created a way to look at the course readings in a way that we could see the old with the new, the conservative with the radical, and the inclusive with the exclusive. So, we toyed around with the questions and how we wanted to place the questions, mapping them and the authors and their texts onto the human body. These questions include:

• How do we define rhetoric?
• What is the province of rhetoric?
• What is the relationship between style and content?
• What is the role of rhetor and audience?
• How does digital technology shape rhetoric?
• What is the relationship between rhetoric and feminism?
• How does language create meaning?

The problem with graphing these questions to particular places on the body is that our placement could be sending a message about where we think these things are located literally in the body. For example, "How does language create meaning?" could have different meanings if we placed this on the mouth versus in the brain. What (I think) we ended up doing was seeing the feet as foundational texts and built up, theorizing about which question was closely related to conversations of definitions of rhetoric or even what sorts of ideas were more central to the common questions throughout the course.

Placing This Week's Authors

Due to the way that we split up the work, each of us took one author to place within our schema. I was given Vasaly's "Ambiance, Rhetoric, and the Meaning of Things." I placed Vasaly under the "roles of rhetor and audience" question because I saw her creating an argument about using place and space as a means of argumentation and persuasion. Not only is the rhetor supposed to evoke these preexisting knowledges I'll say, which I realize maybe isn't the right term, but the audience is also supposed to fill spaces with their experiences and their understanding of place. (Here, I also recognize that I'm using space and place interchangeably. That's because of the context I'm using them for: physical places. I see all places as spaces, but not all spaces as places.) In that way, I see Vasaly doing something similar to when Stroud talks about targeting shared audience/cultural experiences and building on that in order to create meaning. However, instead of through cultural understandings and stories, Vasaly talks about this happens through spaces.

Other Thoughts:

Megan Roche and I were talking the other day about her research for the critical thinking project, and she made a very good point. The rhetorical traditions might not have even been the traditions. There were other examples of texts that talked about rhetoric and rhetorical strategies all the while never calling it rhetoric. This reminds me of a Barthean thought: the multiple "origins" of rhetorical traditions had to come from somewhere. They couldn't have been created of themselves. This would mean that other theorists before them--before Aristotle, before Quintilian and Erasmus--talked about rhetoric and maybe just didn't have a name for it.